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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27701798">Golem</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schadenfreudah/pseuds/Schadenfreudah'>Schadenfreudah</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime &amp; Manga)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Canon Compliant, M/M, Set pre-Millennium World</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-07 04:02:10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,187</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27701798</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schadenfreudah/pseuds/Schadenfreudah</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Ryou builds the spirit's body out of clay.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Bakura Ryou &amp; Diabound (Yu-Gi-Oh!), Bakura Ryou/Thief King Bakura, Bakura Ryou/Yami Bakura</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>42</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Yu-Gi-Oh! It's Time to G-G-G-Gift! [Mini-Exchange]</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Golem</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/orro/gifts">orro</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The snake’s scales were cool to the touch. Ryou was kneeling, and the hot sand burnt through the knees of his jeans, but he didn’t mind. His extended arm remained still; without a word, he allowed the creature to slink up its length onto the junction of his neck and shoulder. Its sinuous body draped itself instinctively over the Millennium Ring’s cord.</p><p>When it was satisfied that it wouldn’t be bucked off, the snake settled there, forked tongue flicking out to taste the parched air. Its beady, dark eyes gazed up at Ryou with familiarity, as if greeting an old friend. In a sense, Ryou supposed it was.</p><p>The path that led down from the mountain was long. But so was the night, and with it the malleable world of Ryou’s dreams. They would reach their intended destination in due time.</p><p>Ryou stood. “Come on, Diabound,” he said. “Let’s go.”</p>
<hr/><p>“Landlord.”</p><p>There was a deep, vast ocean of darkness. It curled around his body, enveloped him. Faintly—through the heavy veil of sleep—he could feel his arm throb. The wound hadn’t healed; weeks had gone by, as well as a host of doctors, and yet it still had not gotten better.</p><p>
  <em>“Landlord.”</em>
</p><p>Ryou allowed his eyes to open and awoke in the bedroom within himself. As it had been since he was a child, the shared room of their soul was small and dark. It smelled stale. Water oozed from the cracks that ran through the ceiling, and its continuous drip onto the thick carpet below filled the silence that reigned.</p><p>The spirit was leaning against the door, his arms crossed over his chest. He was out of place standing amongst the discarded stuffed toys that littered the floor, stiff and awkward, until his eyes found Ryou’s and his tense posture relaxed. The idea that the spirit would find his presence relaxing was in itself surprising, and it put Ryou ill at ease.</p><p>Ryou pushed his body up onto his elbows until he was sitting up and fixed the spirit with a cautious look. “Spirit,” he began, tentatively, when it was clear that the spirit would not be the first to speak between them.</p><p>It had been some time since they had spoken last. Back then, Ryou wouldn’t have felt awkward. Nervous, uneasy, but not awkward. But the blimp had changed things; the debt of gratitude he now owed the spirit changed things. It made him feel tentative. Shy, Ryou almost wanted to say, but the word felt too normal to be used in reference to their nearly nonexistent relation to one another.</p><p>The spirit twitched, and Ryou’s face went hot. It was easy to forget that, in here, the barrier between their minds was fluid. There was no such thing as a private thought—at least not for Ryou. As always, the spirit’s own mind was completely opaque to him. Between them, the silence expanded outwards. The room seemed to stretch. The water dripped faster. More toys appeared on the carpeted ground.</p><p>The spirit looked around in mild distaste and nudged a newly formed plush rabbit away from him with his shoe. “I’ve come to collect a favour,” he said at last.</p><p>“A favour,” Ryou repeated vaguely. The spirit had never been a creature who dealt in favours, at least not with him.</p><p>The spirit’s mouth pinched into a scowl, and he pushed the toy further. Without looking up at Ryou, he sneered, “It won’t hurt your friends, landlord, so don’t worry. Surely even you won’t find it morally objectionable.” The yet that followed lingered in the air, unspoken but plainly obvious.</p><p>Ryou’s throat grew tight. “But I can’t,” he said, out of instinct. Then, before he could say anything more, he swallowed the words down.</p><p>To say ‘yes’ would be a betrayal of all that Yuugi and the rest of them had done for him; it would be a betrayal of the faith they had maintained in him despite everything the spirit had ruined. Ryou had already gone against them once—he had stolen Ring for himself again, to return the spirit to his side, to hold him secretly close to his chest in that cold, metal frame. To do so again would be damnation.</p><p>But Ryou could not bring himself to deny the spirit, just as the spirit had not denied him.</p><p>The spirit’s gaze lifted to meet his. “Landlord,” he began, and there was something just beneath the surface of his tentative address, which Ryou could not understand.</p><p>“Okay,” Ryou said. “Tell me what to do.”</p>
<hr/><p>It was the largest project that Ryou had ever attempted to take on. The details, as the spirit had made evident, had to be exactly accurate. And so it was important that Ryou take notes with fastidious concentration, hunched over a notebook in his living room as the spirit dictated aloud.</p><p>Together, they started with the mountains.</p><p>Vast, craggy cliffs, which ceded into sand, bordered the smattering of villages that spread across the map. They weren’t impossible to traverse in life—the spirit had said as much, a distinct note of pride in the pronouncement—but they had to be unforgiving in this world. The boundaries of the game were limited.</p><p>Ryou sketched them out by hand. His pencil, held in his steady grip, outlined their contours. He could feel the spirit gazing intently at it over his shoulder, and he tried not to let it affect him, focusing instead on the movement of his hand. When he was done, Ryou looked up at the spirit, mouth pursed in a silent question.</p><p>The spirit leaned in closer. It was weird to be near him, because his ghostly body radiated no warmth, and Ryou shivered a little. “Your lines should be sharper,” he said after a moment of observation. “The mountains were much steeper than that. They’re not like they are here.”</p><p>With a nod, Ryou began to erase the slopes he had carved out and scribbled over them with jagged edges, which crept down from the plateau that stretched over the mountains’ top.</p><p>“Better,” the spirit said. Had he been tangible, his breath would have been hot against the shell of Ryou’s ear.</p><p>Ryou forced down his smile, and his chest thrummed with pleasure. “Your memory is really good,” he ventured in response. “I always wanted to know what it was like back then, but there was never anyone to ask, since the other Yuugi doesn’t remember.”</p><p>Though he didn’t voice his response, Ryou could feel the spirit's dull, cold eyes on him, engaging in a silent examination of his form. He shivered under the scrutiny. Their bodies were close, the spirit standing behind his back, and Ryou recognised with a twinge of unease that he had drawn closer.</p><p>The spirit must have realised the same thing, because as soon Ryou tensed, he drew back. “We don’t have much time left,” he muttered. “The model has to be complete, otherwise there’s no point to any of this.”</p><p>Ryou exhaled. His body had become tense, wound tight with trepidation. It was only with the spirit's departure that his muscles slackened and feeling returned to his limbs.</p><p>“Below the cliff,” the spirit began again, some distance away now, “there were villages.”</p>
<hr/><p>When he slept, Ryou woke up at the top of a cliff in Egypt and looked down upon the spray of villages at their base. It was afternoon—the receding sun bathed his pajama-clad body in warmth.</p><p>Ryou stood, instinctively, and stretched out his legs. He breathed in the fresh air, dragged his bare feet through the sand and buried them in it, tipped his head back, and drank in the sunshine, and laughed.</p><p>“I wonder why,” he murmured to himself when the sun set and the landscape before him was swallowed up by night, and then, in his own time, he woke up.</p>
<hr/><p>“I need you to make me,” the spirit ordered abruptly from his place on the desk chair, when Ryou was halfway done with the model.</p><p>Ryou paused, his hand stilling on the chunk of clay he was attempting to reshape. “You need me to make a doll of you,” he clarified. At the edge of the table, the foundations of the hut he had just built began to dry, joining their twins.</p><p>“Yes,” the spirit replied. He didn’t venture any further explanation as to why, nor did Ryou expect one: it was not in the spirit’s nature to explain himself. “But it needs to be perfect. It will take time.”</p><p>Without any real intent, Ryou said, “So, are you going to do to yourself what you used to do to my friends?”</p><p>The spirit let out a dry laugh. “Even if that were what I had planned, it wouldn’t be of any consequence to you.”</p><p>Ryou peered at the spirit, who he was somewhat surprised to notice was already watching him in return. “Well,” he started. “Maybe it wouldn't.”</p><p>“Then you can do this for me, landlord,” the spirit said. His intangible form rose from the chair to drift over to the table Ryou was hunched over. He lingered beside him, eyes tracing Ryou’s mud-encrusted fingers. “You’ve done it before. It will be easy, this time.”</p><p>It wasn’t exactly true. Ryou had made containers, before, empty containers, meant to be filled with an extracted soul. But he knew that this model was not a container, because the spirit had no soul to give.</p><p>“I don’t know how,” Ryou admitted. His face hot, he asked, nervously, “I…what if I do it wrong?”</p><p>The spirit’s hand came to rest on his shoulder. Ryou knew he could not really feel it, and yet he felt as if ghostly imprint burned through the thin fabric of his shirt. "You won’t,” the spirit said, and no more words were exchanged between them.</p>
<hr/><p>The Egypt of Ryou’s dreams was always vacant.</p><p>The capitol city was so far away. He felt as though he could see it, but he had not built it yet, and so he wondered often if that was an illusion, too. Everything was, in this world of dream and memory—the passage of time he bore witness to each night was nothing but a figment of his limited human imagination. Were it the spirit’s perfect world, it could have been frozen in the succulent heat of the mid-afternoon.</p><p>Ryou sat up. The sky was darker than usual; clouds drifted across its stretch and obscured the orange glow of the sun from his view. That was his fault, too. With a sigh, he stood, and stretched out his body. There was never anything to do except wait; the silent valley was nothing but a chasm.</p><p>Then, out from the haze, he heard the rough slide of sand shifting behind him. In Ryou’s own dreams, it could have come from no one except Ryou himself. But he could not have made the noise—he had not moved. Dread trickled into his stomach, and Ryou spun around, but there was no person awaiting him. Rather, slithering between the rocks strewn across the ground, there was a small, white snake.</p><p>A name rose to his lips naturally. “Diabound,” Ryou breathed out. He wasn’t scared—he knew somehow that the snake would not hurt him. “You’re his. Or, you were his.”</p><p>The snake paused in its movement. Its head lifted, and it gazed up at Ryou with some curiosity. Its eyes were dark and reddish, like the spirit’s. Though it was unable to speak with words that Ryou could understand, the snake’s slender, pointed face seemed to ask him, ‘And aren’t you?’</p><p>“Yes,” Ryou confessed, and crouched to level with Diabound. “But I don’t know him in this world. He died a long time before I was born.”</p><p>The snake paused in consideration. Its head turned towards the valley below, the movement liquid under the steady beat of the desert heat, and then back to Ryou. A plaintive expression was etched onto its face. ‘Help,’ it demanded silently.</p><p>“You want me to take you,” Ryou surmised. He looked between the snake and the carved-out space at the base of the sheer cliff. “But I can’t. There’s nothing down there. I haven’t built it yet.”</p><p>Diabound’s tongue slipped out from between its sharp teeth. ‘Help,’ it repeated.</p><p>Ryou shook his head. “I can’t,” he insisted. The words were familiar: he recognised he had voiced them before. “I don’t know how. I’ll do it wrong.”</p><p>Much like the spirit, the snake did not allow this. ‘You are incapable of making mistakes,’ Diabound murmured. It slid towards him, brushed its smooth forehead against his knuckles, and then—suddenly—Ryou was no longer asleep, and Egypt was gone.</p>
<hr/><p>Ryou started to form his new creation with drawings.</p><p>The body, more than anything else, was easy. Ryou knew the spirit hadn’t looked like him—the desert had shaped him, had made him strong and durable, unlike the malnourished, teenage form he had been forced to inhabit. With some embarrassment, he traced firm muscles into his sketchbook.</p><p>Everything else was much harder. The spirit had described his appearance in precise, sterile detail, but it was hard to capture someone he had never seen before in graphite. The expression was always wrong: too soft, or too sombre, or too angry. It was never the spirit’s face.</p><p>“You’re too distracted,” the spirit snapped, after Ryou erased the slope of the nose for the fifth time. “Go to bed. You won’t accomplish anything of note half-asleep.”</p><p>Ryou shook his head and chewed on the inside of his cheek as he squinted down at the half-complete torso on the page. “I can do it,” he insisted. “I’m so close—it’ll only be a little longer.”</p><p>The spirit crossed his arms over his chest and raised a sceptical brow. “You can’t,” he said firmly. “If you keep going to school without having slept, your friends will inevitably notice. And the more suspicious they become, the more you put our endeavour at risk.”</p><p>“They won’t,” Ryou replied instinctively. Then, registering the spirit’s words, he shot him a stubborn frown. “And I’m fine. It’s not like I haven’t gone without sleep before. Our body is used to it.”</p><p>“I already said no,” the spirit hissed, annoyance simmering in his voice. “You’ve done enough tonight.”</p><p>Before he could say another word, the Ring lit up, and ripped Ryou from himself. It happened so fast he didn’t realise what the spirit had done until he was floating above the table, bobbing in the air, and saw the pencil he’d been holding onto gripped in the spirit’s hand.</p><p>“But that’s unfair,” Ryou protested, in shock, as he looked down at his transparent body. “You can’t just do that whenever you’d like.”</p><p>“There’s nothing unfair about it,” the spirit said, with Ryou’s mouth. His eyes, Ryou’s eyes, narrowed in disapproval. “Stop acting like such a child and grow up a little. You don’t even know your own limits. Until you learn them, I can do whatever I please with you. I cannot allow you to jeopardise this out of stubbornness.”</p><p>A knot settled in the pit of Ryou’s stomach. He was struck, then, by the realisation that what the spirit had just said had been true all along. His agreement, his participation in the game, Ryou himself, none of that meant anything at all to the spirit. There was nothing collaborative about any of it: should Ryou have put up resistance, the spirit would have just forced him to cooperate. Maybe he already had, and Ryou was unaware.</p><p>“Fine,” Ryou mumbled, chin jutting away from the spirit’s face. Shame at his own naivety sank low in the pit of his belly, but he did not allow it to rise to his expression; the thought of humiliating himself further by crying in front of the spirit was unbearable. “I’m too tired to do any more tonight.” He bit down on his lower lip to keep his voice from trembling. “I want to go to bed now, so just—give me the body back.”</p><p>The spirit fell quiet. “Landlord,” he said, at last. “You misunderstand me.”</p><p>Ryou shook his head desperately. Tears threatened to spill over his pinched lids despite his best efforts to force them down. <em>“Don’t,</em>” he managed to say.</p><p>There was another long, tense silence, and then Ryou was slipping back into his own skin. The spirit's acquiescence, his silent gesture of concession, hardly felt like a victory. Without a second glance at the eyes he knew were fixed on him from above, Ryou muttered a choked ‘thanks’ under his breath and stalked out of the game room.</p>
<hr/><p>Diabound was curled up at his feet when Ryou awoke, atop the dune.</p><p>Ryou’s mouth twisted, and he pushed himself up until he was upright. “You’re still here,” he said, brushing a thumb lazily over the pale creature’s head. The snake didn’t seem surprised by his sudden arrival; rather, it craned its neck away from the touch to look at him. When its penetrating eyes raised to meet his own, Ryou’s hand halted. “You know, I really thought you would have given up on me by now. I still don’t know how to help you.”</p><p>The snake shot him as sceptical a look as a snake could muster. ‘Foolish,’ its gaze told him. ‘You know how already.’</p><p>“You and him both,” Ryou sighed, and leaned back on his elbows. The words held no reprimand, because he was more tired than angry, now. Tears felt impossible in such a dry world, and because it was a place of his own making, he knew they would not surface. “You expect me to understand what you need from the start, but you never bother to explain anything to me.”</p><p>Diabound seemed amused by this. It angled its head towards the stretch of land below them. ‘Look.’</p><p>Ryou stood and peered over the ledge obligingly, squinting against the bright sun. At the base of the cliff, there was a half-formed village. As he stared at it, he realised he could make out the outline of a small body curled up in its centre. Taken aback, he looked over his shoulder at the snake, who had not moved from its starting position.</p><p>‘You have already begun to succeed,’ Diabound said, looking pleased. ‘You will find a way down.’</p><p>“If I’m going to do this, then I need you to come with me,” Ryou said, and dropped to his knees. With caution, he began to stretch his hand out across the sand, fingers dragging through the tightly packed grains until they were mere inches from the snake’s body.</p><p>‘I wouldn’t have let you go alone,’ the snake said. ‘We will descend together.’</p>
<hr/><p>Ryou awoke to the tone of his alarm, and to the weight of eyes on his prone form. The spirit lingered by the side of the bed, mouth caught in a scowl and thick, white brows knotted on his forehead. Like this, he looked less like Ryou and more like someone else entirely—the sight reassured him and quelled some of the nausea that swelled between his ribs.</p><p>“You didn’t have to wait up for me,” Ryou mumbled as he sat up, swiping a fist over his sleepy eyes. “I would’ve gotten up by myself.”</p><p>The spirit’s eyes caught his. “I know I didn’t have to,” he said. Frustration seeped through the carefully planned words. “I’ve been with you since you were a child, and I watched you live on your own for years. I know very well that you're able to take care of yourself, and I certainly don't plan on doing it for you.”</p><p>“Oh,” Ryou breathed. The vestiges of last night’s irritation, which had already began to cede during the dream, abandoned him. "So you…"</p><p>“You’re not very good at it,” the spirit went on, as if Ryou hadn’t spoken, and crossed his arms over his chest. “It took you months to learn how to cook a proper meal. Before then, you were surviving on TV dinners from the convenience store. I thought you would run out of money.”</p><p>Ryou propped himself up on his elbows to look at the spirit. “Because I hated being alone,” he returned, his eyes wide with curiosity. “I wanted father to come home. I never thought I'd have to be by myself.”</p><p>“I know,” the spirit said meaningfully. His frown tightened. “I was there, landlord. I watched you cry.”</p><p>“Oh,” Ryou said again. He realised that the conversation was no longer about waking up in the morning. It seemed to him now that it never had been.</p><p>The spirit let out a huff, evidently frustrated by Ryou's lack of understanding. “Your skills are your own,” he admitted. On his cheek, Ryou thought he could make out the faint outline of a scar. “This game, and the ones before, they come from you. I wouldn’t have been able to use them even if I had your body and mind. They’re <em>yours</em>. They will continue to be yours.”</p><p>Ryou was bereft of words. “I understand,” he finally said. He smiled at the spirit, shy. “I think I understand, anyway.”</p><p>The room fell silent, save for the low buzz of Ryou’s alarm. Neither of them moved, stuck on each other. An understanding passed between them that Ryou didn't quite understand, so fleeting that by the time he recognised its existence it had fled.</p><p>“You always understood,” the spirit said and, without another word, disappeared into the wall.</p>
<hr/><p>Diabound followed him down to the village below. The path was longer in appearance than in reality, but time was so fluid in Ryou’s dreams that he doubted he could really judge whether it had been minutes or hours. He could not grow thirsty or hungry in this idealisation of Egypt. All that he could feel was the drip of sweat down the nape of his neck, sticking errant strands of hair to his heated skin.</p><p>It was strange to walk among the ruins of what had once been a dwelling space. Ryou had built the dilapidated huts with his own hands, and yet the sight of them like this, crumbled and crumbling further into dirt with each passing moment, surprised him. It wasn’t as if he had never seen a site like this before: through his father’s work at the museum, he had bore witness to many such exhibits. But those had always been snapshots of the past, whereas this, this dead, dying place, was someone's present.</p><p>‘This way,’ Diabound directed him, drawing his attention away from the rubble. ‘I will show you.’</p><p>Ryou allowed the snake to guide him down to the centre of the village, which lay down below layers of destroyed huts. His gaze strayed to the walls as they walked, tracing over their contours, but it was not a curious exploration; each step made dread rise higher in his stomach. It reminded him in some ways of his childhood home, of the vacant bedrooms on the second floor, half disassembled.</p><p>They stopped finally in front of an unclothed body. It was not a person: it had no face, and it was so stiff that Ryou suspected he could break its brittle skin if he shoved hard enough. But it was close enough that he was moved to step closer and examine its form further. Diabound slunk off his shoulder and slipped back to the ground.</p><p>Ryou knelt and drew his hand over what could’ve been a cheekbone. He let his eyes fall shut. An image slotted into place, and as his fingers traced blindly over the clay, he could feel it mould beneath their path. An angular, solid face rose took shape under his palms, a face that was different to the one that the spirit wore for Ryou. It was a face that belonged to the spirit, not borrowed.</p><p>Lips shaping into an 'o,' Ryou breathed life into the shell.</p><p>
  <em>Bakhura.</em>
</p><p>He did not know where the name came from, but it was the right one. In the ruins of the village, emerging from its rubble, it belonged to man he had built. Ryou allowed himself to stroke the warm cheekbone, which he realised had grown warm when he touched it, once more before pulling away. With some effort, he forced his lids open so he could look upon the living, breathing flesh beneath him.</p><p>Light eyes were looking up into his own. Their large, dilated pupils nearly drowned out their colour. “And so I live,” his creation’s voice, the spirit’s voice, Ryou's own voice, purred up at him. “The time has finally come that I can communicate with my master.”</p><p>“Spirit,” Ryou acknowledged, surprised by the familiar words. “But you’re not him. At least, not yet.”</p><p>Bakhura pushed himself up onto his elbows. He was naked, but apparently unashamed. Ryou wasn’t sure whether that was a natural aspect of his personality, or whether he simply had not become aware of his own nakedness yet. Did modesty even matter in a world of only the creator and the created? Still, Ryou looked away anyway, embarrassed on the man’s behalf even if he wasn't going to be embarrassed for himself.</p><p>“Well, I could be,” Bakhura returned. “This is your world, for the moment, not his. If you see us as the same, then while you’re here we are.”</p><p>Ryou allowed himself a wry, albeit still nervous, smile.  “You said ‘his’ and not ‘mine,’” he pointed out. “Doesn’t that mean something about you?”</p><p>Bakhura let out a chuckle. Ryou knew then that this could not be the spirit—he had never once heard the spirit laugh in good humour. “Maybe,” he conceded. “And yet I know perfectly well who you are. Doesn’t<em> that</em> mean something?”</p><p>Unbidden, Ryou’s eyes snapped up from the ground back to the man, who was now sitting upright, directly across from him. The scar that ran through his cheek was deep, long-since faded with age. He was surprised how much of the man's face it took up, since the spirit had only mentioned it in passing.</p><p>“Maybe,” Ryou echoed, looking at him openly now, his embarrassment ceding. “But I don’t know who you are. Not really, anyways.” He looked briefly to their surroundings, and murmured, “I definitely don’t know what you’re doing here. This isn't a place for kings.”</p><p>Bakhura laughed again. It was a high, free sort of sound. Ryou wondered in absent curiosity whether the spirit’s would be the same.</p><p>“What miserable stories you want to hear,” he said. “They’re not particularly interesting, unless you enjoy politics. I find that I’ve grown less concerned with the details over time—it’s foolish to dwell endlessly on the past unless you’re using it to achieve an end."</p><p>Ryou scooted ever so slightly closer. “And are you?” he enquired. “Using your past to take you somewhere, I mean.”</p><p>“Yes,” Bakhura answered. His pale eyes grew bright. There was something unnerving about the hollow light that lay behind his irises, and Ryou shuddered. “And so are you. We're doing it together.”</p><p>Ryou could feel Diabound’s impatience. Time was running short, he realised. He would wake soon, and he would not come back.</p><p>“If you’re him,” Ryou said suddenly, “then, tell me where you’re going when this is all over. I don’t care why, just…where. Because he keeps—<em>you</em> keep talking like you’re going to leave me behind. Preparing me for it.” He swallowed. “<em>Please</em>.”</p><p>Bakhura tilted his head. The gesture was easy, languid like the shifting of sand.</p><p>“Ryou,” he said, calmly, with the spirit’s voice. “You are my progenitor. I couldn’t leave you behind if I tried.”</p><p>Desperate to touch, Ryou bore forwards and pressed his mouth against Bakhura’s. His lips were dry, but they were warm, too, slotting against Ryou's in slow, lazy movements, as if they had all the time in the world. Breaths passed in shudders, in the narrow gap between them. </p><p>Bakhura's hands slipped down to rest on his waist, and he drew Ryou closer to his solid body, pulling him into his lap. "Landlord," he muttered, and then Ryou opened his eyes in his bedroom in Domino.</p><p>The curtain to his bedroom shifted slightly with the wind. The light of morning filtered through its thin material, silhouettes of buildings darkened against the soft day.</p><p>Alone, for the spirit had not yet surfaced, Ryou raised a hand to touch his still swollen lips and began to cry.</p>
<hr/><p>“Though it's not a bad thing, it's strange that they've allowed us so much time,” the spirit had commented, back when Ryou first began to assemble the materials needed for building the model. “Yuugi is more hesitant to surrender the God cards to the slab than I had anticipated.”</p><p>Ryou raised his head to look at him. The spirit was sitting on the ground, legs splayed out in front of him. From this angle, he seemed to Ryou as if he were a corporeal being. To a casual observer they might have looked like brothers.</p><p>“Well, that’s to be expected,” he said, cautious not to offend. “Yuugi-kun and the other Yuugi are close to each other. There’s something rather lonely to the notion of Yuugi giving him his memories of the past back.”</p><p>The spirit raised a brow. “‘Lonely,’” he repeated, sceptical. “In what sense would that be lonely?”</p><p>Flattening the clay under his hand, Ryou let out a hum. “I guess it’s comforting, knowing that there's someone out there who relies on you,” he said. “To feel like you’re their only anchor to the world. In a way, when that person is able to live on their own, it’s like being abandoned. Since they don’t need you anymore, they can go on without you.”</p><p>“And you feel that way, too,” the spirit said.</p><p>“I never said that,” Ryou replied quickly, but he was a little embarrassed nonetheless. The spirit's accusation was truer than he was comfortable admitting. “That’s just how Yuugi-kun feels.”</p><p>The spirit fell silent for a moment. “Being lonely,” he started. “There’s no point to it. It’s not as if the Pharaoh would have been able to stay in this world forever. He was never alive here to begin with.”</p><p>Ryou’s hands stilled. “That doesn’t make him any less real,” he said.</p><p>With a low huff of breath, the spirit passed his immaterial hands through Ryou’s shoulder. “See,” he said. There was a bitter edge to his voice. “He couldn’t even touch Yuugi if he wanted to.”</p><p>“It's not as if that means bearing the pain of losing him is any easier,” Ryou said, and turned back to his work. “Even if he doesn’t think of himself as being alive, it still feels real.” He paused, gnawing on his lip. "To Yuugi."</p><p>“To Yuugi,” the spirit muttered. He drifted out of sight. “Right.”</p><p>Ryou let out a soft sigh. “Sometimes,” he said, “I wonder about you."</p><p>He swiveled around, about to say something more, but before he was able to finish his thought the spirit was already gone. In his wake, he left behind nothing but silence.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Well, that's it! I really liked the themes I was given to work with, and I hope this wasn't a little <em>too</em> angsty or off-beat. I love playing with canon and coaxing stories out of the implications Takahashi introduces surrounding Bakura and Ryou; especially with regard to his relationship with Thief King, Ryou definitely could have (and perhaps did, in the background) done so much more. I enjoyed writing this a lot, and I hope my giftee enjoys reading it, too.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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